1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to content adaptation or media transformation in a general context; and more particularly relates to content adaptation or media transformation in the context of a mobile terminal.
In the future as the applicability of Digital Rights Management (DRM) increases in popularity there is a risk that general content adaptation done at some proxy network like a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) network proxy may not be acceptable legally. This invention addresses this problematic situation and proposes a solution wherein the network proxy can still continue to do the content adaptation, but legally.
2. Description of Related Art
Content adaptation is likely to increasingly become a legal issue in the future. Moreover, it will be an increasingly more significant concern for market leaders in the mobile industry, since content adaptation is mostly required for terminals of limited capabilities in contrast to desktop personal computers or laptops which have significantly more capabilities.
With growing mobile access of Internet content, the necessity of adapting/transforming media or content included in the websites for optimal user experience is becoming increasingly necessary. Some websites are already not allowing any content adaptation on the client side. For example, sites of major companies already do not allow any content adaptation. Also, issues like scaling down an image to fit the appropriate screen size and resolution of a mobile terminal may in effect make the image unusable in its proper context. The same argument may hold with brand logos or other copyrighted information. In the future as the DRM increases in popularity there is a risk that general content adaptation done at some proxy like a WAP proxy may not be acceptable legally.
In the prior art, content adaptation is performed by the content provider or at the client side proxy. The content provider may not provide full content adaptation because then it may not really know the capabilities of the terminals for which it needs to adapt, nor is this approach cost effective. The content provider can provide the same content in different formats suitable for different devices, though this is an expensive approach. Even then, the problem of optimal user experience based on the terminal used is quite difficult to achieve. The content needs to be transformed/adapted on the fly in the network, with the knowledge of terminal capabilities and network parameters.
To date, there is no explicit need to obtain rights for transforming/adapting the content in the client side proxy, but, in future the scenario may become entirely different.
Further, there is no known prior art which provides a rights representation language or schemas for such content adaptation.